WAS
HE HITLER'S PET ITALIAN MASTIFF

This month, April 28th to be precise, will be the
66th anniversary of the shooting/murder/assassination of Benito Mussolini, Claretta
Petacci and others.

And he certainly hasn't been forgotten in film,
with such diverse actors as Jack Oakie, Rod Steiger, George C. Scott, and Bob Hoskins
all trying to worm under the skin of the man they called "Il Duce." I personally always
suggested that the late Telly Savlos, who would have made a marvellous Benito Mussolini,
if he had only been approached by an ambitious film producer.

Yet Hitler and Mussolini will forever be associated
with each other in history, both would fight in the Great War and reach the rank of
corporal, both would be amateur musicians (Hitler the pianist and Mussolini the violinist.)
However I do not see Benito as rabidly anti-Semitic as Hitler certainly was.

In some ways he tried to navigate the difficult
middle way so happily promoted and promulgated by Blair and Clinton, but later leaned
towards the Nazi war machine after 1940.

He would ban birth control, divorce and emigration
as well as drum up support for more tourists to visit Italy.

However in running his country for 20 years, he
would bring it at times screaming into the 20th century but he persisted, yet his
fatal mistake was to aligning himself to Hitler's expansion programme. General Franco
on the other hand did the opposite.

But I suspect Benito craved some of the fame the
Fuhrer so enjoyed. And he was perhaps the first fascist leader to strike a popular
chord with the masses before it evaporated. And even in Germany a watching Hitler
in his early days perhaps copied the Roman salute and the fashionable black shirt
from him that would in Germany become the despised brown shirt. Mussolini would once
predict that the 20th century would be the century of fascism, well he got that right.

And both men found ways to accommodate the Catholic
church in to their own countries everyday life. Mussolini would sign the Lateran Treaty
(1929) for Italy with Hitler signing the Nazi concordat for Germany (1933.) Today's
modern Vatican City was conceived out of this treaty and both men claimed to be atheists,
yet Hitler looked to Norse gods for inspiration. Mussolini seems to have believed
in very little spiritually. Yet the Pope who would claim of Mussolini that: "He was
a man sent from providence." Well he certainly got that wrong.

After the First World War he seemed to journey from
Marxism to narcissism with the greatest of ease. He would also flirt with Freemasonry
and later weed out many of his generals who might be themselves performing in Masonic
rituals. "Il Duce" as he liked to be known was a "one-world" man who believed only
in his own selfish ways and that the world that revolved just for him.

And certainly Mussolini was rather proud of his
green credentials even before they became fashionable. He even declared the Isle of
Capri to be a bird sanctuary. He also promoted the idea of shrinking newspapers to
conserve the world's wood/pulp. All commendable green causes it seems.

Yet with his fall from power in 1943, soon after
the daring mission to rescue him by Otto Skorzeny (see article on him), his place
at the high table of Nazism seemed to dim. It may have been more expedient if Hitler
had left him alone in the mountains to await his own fate from his own country and
who knows he might have stood trial and been quietly released some years later to
compose his memoirs in his beloved Predappio. (In fact today there is an ornate shrine/grave
erected to his memory where every year thousands journey to this "Fascist Lourdes"
to remember the man and some of his mystic.)

Hitler had once certainly been an early admirer
of Benito, even mentioning his name in Mein Kempt. Yet
after the rescue of Mussolini and arriving in Berlin in 1943, he would become a liability.
This I suspect would prompt him in preparing to return to Italy, then divided in a
bitter civil war. Yet of his own life he once wrote that: "Who fears death has never
lived and I have lived too much."

Yet death does you know claim 150,000 each day,
suddenly and swiftly, many unprepared and most unrepentant. How sad, how futile.

Mention must be made of the young woman who would
be forever associated with him Clareeta Petacci his doomed mistress. Yet she was not
just any young woman who languished under his spell. Her father was one of the pope's
personal doctors and at her wedding in 1934 no less a personage attending the nuptials
was the pro-German Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacceli, later to become pope
Pius XII of course (Hitler's Pope as he is also affectionately called.) Clarita was
also an inveterate secret diary keeper it seems and isn't this always dangerous in
the world of politics.

Yet sixty years later so much surrounding the final
one hundred days of Mussolini's life and death remain unclear and unanswered. "The
game is up for me, it is finished," he would lament in his final hours to any who
would listen to him. Yet few will accept death when it presents its calling card for
a personal audience with God. But more importantly James 4:14 reminds us:

"Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow."
Death as they say happens everyday. Are you ready for your own appointment when it
presents itself to you?

Again his motto was: "Believe! Obey! Fight!" But
this seems to have applied to all others but certainly not to him. Once he said: "Fascism
is a religious conception." He would attempt to dismiss the Holy Bible to the scrap
heap of history and in this he would fail as all other dictators have and will do
so now and in the future.

Yet certain circumstances of the events of Mussolini's
final days still remain unanswered and rather baffling, for example:

1. Why when he and his party were so close to capture
and so near to safe Switzerland did he foolishly turn back to confront his enemies
and who was "the renowned religious figure" that he trusted to aid him but never seemed
to materielize? So were the Partisans reliably tipped off about his whereabouts by
intelligence units of the approaching allies and had an agreement been reached that
he would never stand trial.

2. Why did he fear capture from the Allies and was
there a Churchill/MI5 connection concerning his murder on the 26th April, and did
he indeed conceal important correspondence from Prime Minister Churchill to himself
as some claim.And why did the former
Prime Minster soon after the wars end take a painting vacation in Italy and very near
to where both Benito and Clarette had been held captive before their brutal executions.
Is this a coincidence or not.

3. And what of the perhaps dubious Vatican involvement
with the assistance Mussolini would receive from cardinal Shuster of Milan in those
final weeks. In fact in the square close to the cathedral the world would witness
the infamous photos of Mussolini and Claretta hanging from their swollen ankles so
grotesquely after they had been beaten abused and urinated upon by a frenzied mob.
Appalling pictures even today.

So the mystery of Mussolini's murder seems to have
presented the enquirer with more questions than answers.

5 And finally what of poor Claretta Pettachi's secret
diaries that for so long were locked away in the state archive in Italy. Some of these
were to be published in 2002 (in fact some were in 2009, however after objections
from a family member in America, the dairies were withdrawn and will not be released
for full inspection until amazingly 2015.So
is there perhaps in those locked away notebooks that the state has withdrawn something
that might damage England, Italian, Vatican relations. Even today in 2012, it does
seem rather odd. This confusion on what the ItalianGovernment has withheld
and what will be permitted in 2015 for release only seems to preserve this Italian
melodrama forever in the public eye and of course the name of Mussolini and Claretta
of course will march on forever, when really they should have been consigned to the
distant past years ago.

In conclusion the mystery of Benito Mussolini's
demise seems to me to raise more serious questions than convenient answers.

But then isn't that true of all ongoing mysteries.

"And as it is appointed unto men once to die but
after this the judgment."

Update

According to the London Guardian, dated 25
January 2013, the Vatican in London is concealing hidden millions of pounds in lucrative
property. In fact the Vatican international portfolio emanating from Luxemburg/Switzerland
seems to be thriving in Europe.

In London alone upmarket jewellers
and prestigious investment bankers, as well as luxury properties are benefiting from
this lucrative blue chip stock, which originally was part of the money Benito Mussolini
paid over to the Vatican in 1929, known today as 'the Lateran pact.'

Even during the War and afterwards
the Allies were noting these "shady activities and dirty work," coming from the Vatican
in the movement of millions.

Today the pope's so-called 'merchant
banker' based in Rome seems to be controlling a nest egg of assets valued at approx
570 million pounds, if not more. Not bad in any money language. When the paper's reporters
naturally asked the pope’s representative in Wimbledon for a statement about this
wealth’ they were informed "no comment." Were not surprised.

So much for the so-called ‘church of
Christ’ concealing its true colours. In fact in Matthew 24:23 Jesus warns: "If anyone
says to you behold here is the Christ, do not believe him."

The church of Rome has always been
a flawed religious institution which will be destroyed one day when Christ returns
in a physical body to eliminate all false religions and political institutions. These
men, both bankers and clerics who are knowingly involved in these “shady” transaction's,
should be shaking in fear and begin examining their consciences before it’s too late.